League of Legends developer Riot has said it’s now “backing away” from an increase in penalties for ‘dodging’ it was planning to introduce to its flagship MOBA game. While the studio recently announced it was aiming to “slowly tune up the penalties for repeated Champ select dodges”, it’s now said it will be focusing on sorting out in-game shenanigans and matchmaking first.

That’s according to LoL’s lead gameplay designer Mark Yetter, who has posted on Twitter: “We’re backing away from dodge penalty increases. Hearing your feedback about the reasons that make you want to dodge convinced us that we can get more value hitting those issues first.” This means the League dev team is now “refocusing on reducing game ruining behaviour and matchmaking improvements”.

This marks a pretty significant shift from plans laid out in a recent dev post, which explained “Champ select dodges are something that hurts the overall player experience” because it means the other players get put back into longer queues. While the studio acknowledged there are various reasons players might want to dodge a lobby they’re in, and that it’s sometimes ok (“as a rare outlet”), it believed the action was being overused, and without “significant enough penalties”.

Riot’s plans to address “more egregious cases” of constant dodging included increasing the “repeated dodge timeout”, as well as hiking LP penalties for dodging.

We're backing away from dodge penalty increases. Hearing your feedback about the reasons that make you want to dodge convinced us that we can get more value hitting those issues first.

The team is refocusing on reducing game ruining behavior and matchmaking improvements.

However, it seems the League player community has raised concerns about the changes, with things such as toxic lobbies, Champion allocation, and autofills sometimes being the reason players feel they want to dodge, and feedback on this has led to Riot’s “refocusing”.

However, there are still some changes on the way that will impact dodging. Yetter adds: “Worth noting – we have discovered a misconfiguration in the dodge timers that we are still planning on fixing. This will allow the system to correctly escalate penalties for players repeatedly dodging as it has in previous years.”

Worth noting – we have discovered a misconfiguration in the dodge timers that we are still planning on fixing. This will allow the system to correctly escalate penalties for players repeatedly dodging as it has in previous years.

Carrie cut her gaming teeth on the early Tomb Raiders and a lot of Worms 2, but has since developed slightly wider interests. An avid lover of cats, coffee, and Fable, she is desperately awaiting news of Fable 4.